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by Sixer

Na’ No’ Yo’ Normal Novel Writing

For some reason I really wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year – that crazy, month long sprint to 50,000 words. And every time I brought it up amongst my literary friends – and got the appropriately literary version of “meh” as a response – my intention doubled. Forget that I didn’t know which novel to work on, forget that I have three or four other projects going this month, forget that I’m up to my eyeballs busy. The only voice that really got through to me was the quiet one in the corner who, really, just wanted to cast on and start knitting. This gave me pause. Long pause. And though I kept up the gun-ho optimism, and signed in with a placeholder novel, my plans for November started to seem a bit desperate. I cast on for a cowl on Saturday (and have done nothing with it since, naturally) and today I realized what I was going to do about Nano.

    1. I will not be participating in Nano
    2. I will be writing

I’ve been reading teacher blogs at work lately ( . . . . I have no excuse for this ), and one I’ve come to adore is Michael Pershan’s Teaching With Problems, he talks in one post about writing slowly and well and deeply, and that makes me think about what kinds of writing I take enjoyment in. Not what I enjoy reading, although it’s interesting to think about how the activities are connected, but what I actively enjoy the process of crafting. I like research writing. I like writing about nothing while talking about things. I like snappy, funny, clever writing – but I tend to like it in flashes: warm, merry darts of sunshine amidst a subaqueous canopy of words. I liked my review for Princess Passes, and normally I hate reviewing, and I love my response post to the first chapter of tea table talks. I like thinking out loud on paper screen, and being prosy and vague in ways that you simply aren’t supposed to be in fiction or emails or text messages. So for Nano I will be writing. No, I will not subject you to a post a day, but I think one a week is a challenging-but-still-doable-well goal. I will aim for quantity (becasue that’s easy to measure) but focus on content (becasue that’s what we’re all here for, right?).

So here’s to the words to come, and the thoughts they might inspire.

by Sixer

Whatever May

. . . . There is something about the month of May that begs for puns. No other month is so open to them. Sure, you can March over to April, but once you have done so you’re out of it. May has a bit more range.

But I’m not really writing about May. Nor am I writing about writing, if you can believe it, nor Spring, nor plans future, nor any such wishy-washy excuse to ramble. No. I am writing about a belt.

I can not fully remember life before the belt. I thought of it barely two months into my new job, as my boss casually pulled pliers, screw drivers, and wire strippers out of the pouch that clipped to his own belt loops. His phone handily mounted beside it. His multitude of keys dangling from a carabiner on the other hip. I myself ran back and forth from whatever tool room was closest, and struggled not to walk so far from my phone that I couldn’t hear it vibrate. I have no pockets worth mentioning, and exactly zero functioning belt loops. To acquire either would mean radically renovating my wardrobe and, even more, abandoning the haphazardous collection of silhouettes that constitutes what might be termed my style. Doggedly I struggled on, all the while dreaming of the perfect belt. A work belt. A belt of pockets and loops. And then, finally, after a year of minor frustrations and inefficiency, I buckled down and made it.

Oh.

That was in September. By November I had stopped pretending any kind of civilized fashion sense and had started wearing it out all places, even to church. I wore it to a wedding too, over my Little Black Dress (my excuse was that I was also playing the bartender and so, technically, since I wasn’t a guest, I didn’t have to be in full formal attire). It’s quite amusing to remember that the number two reason I hesitated to make it in the first place was feared self conciseness about how it would look. Pooh. Practicality once again has ground my vanity into the dust with a contemptuous laugh. Besides, I’ve gotten compliments on it. Not just “how cute” either, though those are nice, but the slightly more grown up “how clever.” The only draw back to the later is I can’t really remember how I made it, and so can’t be sure if it was really clever or some combination  of luck and an uncured predilection for hoarding.

The belt has saved me a lot more than missed work emails and a few thousand extra steps to track down tools. I made a vow to myself last year that if I didn’t show some initiative and make something useful, sewing wise, by the end of January, 2017, I would pack my sewing kit up and give it all away. The belt was a such a success that even if it hadn’t been followed by two much smaller creations the room would have been spared. In a lot of ways it seems like such a minor victory, when my goal is always public-acceptable clothes, but if I stop and think about it, even a well made shirt would only be worn once a week. The belt gets worn six or seven times that.

Okay, for those who care about such things, here’s a very non-technical write up of my process for making it, as far as I can remember. The material I used was the waistband and part of the pant leg of a pair of second-hand capris I purchased four or five years ago. The original intention was to make a skirt, but honestly I bought them becasue the buttons were so cute and I loved all the little details. I had some extremely complicated ambitions for the belt originally, but by the time I’d completed them the plan had been reduced to two rectangles. The top rectangle was both longer and taller than the back piece. Since there was a flat felled seam running about two inches from the bottom of my fabric, I decided to make that the bottom edge for added strength and structure – this also brought the tops up to a similar height. Serendipity. I’m not sure if I actually realized I would need a 3D structure in order to really fit things in these pockets, perhaps I hit upon the idea of tucks simply becasue the  top piece was so much longer than the back and I was too lazy to cut it, or maybe it was because folding the felled seam down to the bottom edge created an excess of fabric that had to go somewhere. Either way, once I had the pleats down everything else was history. The inclusion of the pants’ coin pocket was another conceit of accidental brilliance. I included it becasue it was too cute to toss aside, but it has turned out to be indispensable for holding mini USBs, quarters, screw heads, and VGA adapters.

The hard parts were all in attaching the binding and cleaning up the edges of the waistband – I had hacked it off without really thinking a whole lot about how I wanted it finished and didn’t really leave myself much space for seam allowances. I ended up binding it with fabric from the leg. It works, becasue of the nature of the item, but is neither professional nor elegant. The pocket strip, too, was a little tricky to attach to the belt, and the depth of the pockets meant there was more weight in them than my original seaming could hold. I ended up supplementing it with safety pins until around December, when I went over it with enough stitches to keep King Kong tied down. I have a multitude of plans for remaking these, and most of them involve a strip of only three pockets – more space really is less, I’ve found. For a more sophisticated interpretation I would love to make a zippered pouch on the underside, perhaps in the band itself, for passport like things which shouldn’t be openly advertised.

Already this belt is showing signs of, shall we say, excessive love. My flawed but pretty bound edge has been worn open in a half dozen places, and in one of the places I reinforced with extra stitches the fabric itself has given out and formed a hole. Strangely, I’m not really saddened or alarmed by these ominous signs. The knowledge that this garment can be, if not recreated, at least replaced is rather delicious, and though I might put it off longer than is really wise, I’m still looking forward to the challenge.

by Sixer

The New Old Thing

After I finished reading about apocalypse-by-bee, I picked up Level 7, by Mordecai Roshwald. I can not seem to help reading in themes – Herzog’s book wasn’t even the start. When I read these books I was knee deep in a study of Revelations.

Level 7 is a thin, black, hard back published in 1959. My great-grandmother, from whom my grandfather received a large number of his collection, has written a lengthy epistle all over the fronts piece and title page. Her letter made a touching preface, helping me sink back in time to a place where the threat of utter annihilation by bomb was very, very real.

Even with that as a warning, I was still unsure of what the book was for the first few pages. Was this a real life account? Did this actually happen? Only when the main character was sealed up in a sterilized town thousands of miles below the surface of the Earth did I finally feel confident in proclaiming it pure, if informed, fiction.

The sum of the story is simple enough. The main character is a button pusher for the military, trained to launch missiles at The Enemy if the worst should come and they found themselves under attack. He and about 200 other people are more or less tricked into populating an underground safe house where they are told they must pass out their days. The first half of the book is a methodical journal of the daily life of these people. It’s fascinating, but in a morbid kind of way. The 50s were not kind to interpersonal relations, and none of the 200 people feel real. The women are as bad as the men, except they talk more and so expose themselves more openly. No, I take that back. The main character talks the most, and I found myself torn between sympathy, frustration, and amusement over his plight, naivety, and assumptions.

The second half of the book is an equally methodical detailing of the world going to pieces at rocket speed. In case you haven’t already gathered, this is not a cheery, feel good book. Everyone dies: some just die slower than others. And of course the real tragedy is that it’s all for nothing. Well, naturally: if everyone dies this must be so. But even beyond that, the first missile was launched accidentally by a computer – a simple coding error that started a chain reaction of automated destruction. With the amount of thought that went into building these machines, it is not surprising that there was so little left over to design defenses. We take it as a matter of course that none of the precautions put in place to protect civilians from the fall-out worked – the radiation penetrated the shallower shelters and poisoned the water of the deeper stations. But the dernier cri, the ultimate expression of irony, was that our little subterranean town was completely safe from the atomic fallout caused by their actions. They only died of radiation poisoning becasue their nuclear generator developed a leak.

The last pages of the story are written by our doubtful hero as he lies in bed, dying. . . .

It was rather subduing. I’ve always said I was a passivist, not a pacifistic. The idea that selfish people can share a planet without dissolving occasionally into fist fights seems dangerously naive to me. But as I read books like this, and ones like Connie Willis’ Lincoln’s Dreams and Wouk’s The Hope, I find war stripped of any younger associations with glory and valor. It can be honorable to fight, I still believe there is a time when we must answer war with war, but even more obvious is the importance of cultivating meekness in our interactions with others. True honor, whether in a conqueror or a servant, comes from humility not pride. From defending another’s rights, not extending the limits of your own. Nobody wins in war. Only when peace means turning a blind eye to human suffering should such a sorry stalemate be sought after.

This was book 2 out of 12 for TBR 2016. Read in March, I’m still currently reading my third book for the challenge – a modern, non-fiction book which is both exotic and exasperatingly familiar. Will I be able to make up my two month deficit? Stay tuned to find out . . . .

by Sixer

Just a little

I scattered seeds two weeks ago – has it really been two weeks? Nothing major, just some cress and chard and mustard and basil, the latter being an obvious no. Last year I sowed them in February and was rewarded with sprouts in March. Well, I glanced at my bin on the 14th and discovered a generous sprinkling of these:

 They could be any type of green – possibly self sowed arugula from last year, even. It is nice to be reminded that there is really no notion of behind in the lexicon of an arm chair gardener. Even without these sprouts, I was in the green with my scraggly swiss chard nubs, not to mention herbs:


Represented here by the parsley that over wintered. These plants stayed green until about January, when it finally got cold, but they popped back up as soon as the last of the February snows had melted. I tore away all the dead, yellow bits and now they look young and full of promise. I didn’t realize parsley was a perennial, but I’m beginning to see that most plants would be, if given the right conditions. Mixed with the uncontainable ardor of mint, the perking up of the lavender, and the thin blades of dill, they promise a lush and bountiful Spring.

My plates are standing at the ready.

by Sixer

Review of 2015

Well here we are, at the end of our first week in 2016. It is a time to look back and reflect . . . . and then get out your score cards and tally everything up.

In that spirit, here are the final outcomes of my vague 2015 goals.

TBR: Fail

This was an abject, though enjoyable, failure. I learned that I can rip through a book in a day or two only if that book is 1) mass market, or 2) devoid of any value – intellectual, emotional, or otherwise. Everything else takes intentional thought and time.  I finished  9 out of the 24 books I pledged for. In order:

The Hope: A Novel
The Book of Lights
On the Kabbalah
Compilation of  three of Shaw’s plays
Six Histories (Shakespeare) – Not Blogged
The Fortunate Wayfarer – Not Blogged
Fathers and Sons –  Not reviewed
Ferdinand Magellan  – Not Reviewed
Monsieur Beaucaire (et. al.) – Not Blogged

I started reading for this challenge in April, instead of January as I ought. In July it looked like I was going to make it anyway, and then I slowed to a crawl in September. Things really stalled in November, with Nano, and I started a book of Bacon’s essays and a book of Keat’s poems thinking they’d be easy to nibble at between word sprints. I’m still in the middle of both of those – I’m finding Keats rather appalling stuff to wade through, and it feels flippant to flip through Bacon’s one liners without giving them time and consideration. However, even if I had finished those two I still wouldn’t have been able to make it to the halfway mark. It’s a fail for me on this one, then, and yet I enjoyed it so much, grumbling aside, that I’m going to try again for 2016. This time, I think I’ll take a hill.

Crafting: Fail

I had huge plans for my sewing this year too. While I’m not surprised to find reality fell short, I am a little disappointed I never cut out the dress pattern that I patiently traced back in October. On the other hand I graded a sock pattern (wrongly, but still, ‘A’ for effort) and then actually went back and regraded it when I realized it was too big, and then went back again to make a second proto-type with modifications to help with fit. The socks are still a little loose, especially in the ankle, but I’m pretty happy I was able to sit down and tweak them without loosing patience. Or interest.

I also sewed a long cat rice bag neckwarmer – twice. The first one was too small, overstuffed, and plain poorly sewn. The second one I made sure to top stitch around the edges to prevent my seams from bursting. I have trouble sewing with a 5/8 seam allowance  – it seems wasteful somehow – and since I can’t quite sew straight yet this causes all sorts of fun problems. The cat was a present, as were the five sweater potpourri hearts I embroidered for the ladies in my bible study. I love embroidering, but it’s hard to justify practicing something that has no practical benefit, so this was a lovely excuse to break out my hand-me-down silks and just be artsy.

 

Japanese: Win

I finished my 守人 novel!

Writing: Tie

While last year’s nano novel is still languishing away, only half proof-read, I did manage to get another “win” during nanowriomo, when I added 50k words to a completely different work.

Blogging: Win

Not that  I blogged that much, but I wrote a review for six of the nine books I read this year, which puts me way ahead of my posting average.

Work: Win

Through no fault of my own, I lost my job and got a brand new, completely awesome position with built in community. Though I still miss all my old coworkers, I’m constantly thanking God for my new job. Yes, even now, six months later, I can hardly believe how lucky I am to be here. For example: this afternooon, I spent almost four solid hours poking at SQL codes.

 

Final Score: Tie

It was a bad year, it was a good year – and so on for another five pages. When all is said and done, this year was monumental in my favor, but I’m ready now for a quieter, blander trip around the sun. There was a lot of uncertainty and anxiety in 2015, and even though I know this has stretched my capacity to trust God and helped me realize how much I cling to things that I don’t need, I’m hoping I’ll be stretched in other ways for a bit. I’m especially looking forward to growing better at interacting with people and not seeing my time as something to hoard but as something to invest.